French teenagers have taken to the streets in large numbers over the past week, with more than 6,000 people arrested — many of them under 18 — and hundreds of schools either blockaded or closed, according to Guardian columnist Kitty Sayers.
In Lens, a 15-year-old lost a hand to a police grenade while taking part in a blockade, Sayers writes. Parents have joined their children in demonstrations and called on others to do the same for a general strike planned for 17 October, a demand Sayers says also responds to police brutality witnessed during the past week.
Sayers, who grew up in France as a Briton, contrasts the scenes with Britain, where she says young people have plenty of grievances — including crushing student debt, private-school privilege and an inaccessible housing market — but little tradition of collective action.
She attributes the difference to civic education. French pupils are taught that protest, uprising and rioting produced their freedoms, and that they have the power to change what they dislike. The French Revolution appears twice in the curriculum, at ages 12 and 16, while the student protests of 1968 are taught at 14 and again at 17. Debating is encouraged from collège, at about 11 years old.
Protesting is presented as a legally framed fundamental right and a civic responsibility, Sayers writes. With lycéens too young to vote, she argues, protest is the next best option.
In the final year of lycée, pupils study Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), which holds that citizens surrender unrestricted natural liberty in exchange for civil and moral freedoms. Individuals set aside their own interests for the volonté générale — broadly, they pay heavy taxes and expect the country to function in return.
That bargain shapes how the French view the state, according to Sayers. When the government raises the retirement age, allows electricity bills to soar or cuts school budgets, the French read it as a breach of the social contract, and protest follows automatically.
Britons, by contrast, are subjects of the UK and tend toward an American-style individualism and a desire to live and let live, Sayers writes. Britain has a significant history of protest — Peterloo, the Chartists, the suffragettes and the poll tax riots — but these events can be remembered as stand-alone episodes rather than as the national story itself. She also argues the Thatcher era damaged unions permanently, leaving the British public compliant and short of organising power.
French protesters are bolstered by solidarity from firefighters, nurses, lawyers and teachers, Sayers says, pointing to a viral video of the mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, shielding students from police as an example. She writes that it is difficult to imagine British teenagers taking to the streets, because they would be on their own.
Sayers notes that not every French parent backs every protest, and that some students — particularly those from conservative households — regard the blockades as a leftwing plot. She also observes that the state’s response does not match its curriculum, describing the force used against students as a contradiction.
French students are not necessarily more political than their British counterparts, she writes: young Britons are active, but tend to join established movements such as Extinction Rebellion or the Gaza protests rather than start their own. The real divide, Sayers concludes, is the French willingness to take to the streets suddenly and en masse, engaging with the state as citizens and challenging it when necessary — which, she adds, means the lycéens are simply being good students.
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